These Indian ships were both fast and very large. Ordinary samanya ships were used for inland waters, and visesa ships were meant for sea journeys. The largest of these were called manthara ships, and they measured 120 feet in length, sixty feet in breadth, and sixty feet in height. In his book Foreign Trade and Commerce in Ancient India, Prakash Charan Prasad notes:
Big ships were built. They could carry anywhere upwards from 500 men on the high seas. The Yuktialpataru classifies ships according to their sizes and shapes. The Rajavalliya says that the ship in which King Sinhaba of Bengal [ca. sixth century B.C.] sent Prince Vijaya, accommodated full 700 passengers, and the ship in which Vijaya’s Pandyan bride was brought over to Lanka carried 800 passengers on board. The ship in which Buddha in the Supparaka Bodhisat incarnation made his voyages from Bharukachha (Broach) to the “sea of the seven gems” [Sri Lanka], carried 700 merchants besides himself. The Samuddha Vanija Jakarta mentions a ship that accommodated one thousand carpenters.5
According to Marco Polo, “An Indian ship could carry crews between 100 and 300. Out of regard for passenger convenience and comfort, the ships were well furnished and decorated. Gold, silver, copper, and compound of all these substances were generally used for ornamentation and decoration.6
Did Indus Valley civilizations have the infrastructure to manufacture, manage, maintain, and direct such large vessels for overseas trade and investigations? Consistent with revelations of Indus Valley and Indo-European presences in the Great Basin, the discovery of a giant underwater city off the coast of Cambay in India is challenging the archaeopriests’ version of the physical nature of the origins of civilization. The finding by India’s National Institute of Ocean Technology reveals man-made structures composed of giant granite blocks at a depth of forty meters. Artifacts dredged from the site during excavations beginning in 2000 helped date the site to around 7,500 B.C. In other words, this city found in the Bay of Cambay is older than the Sumerian civilization by several thousand years.7 But like any discovery that threatens the status quo in archaeology, these discoveries continue to be challenged.8
Fig. 12.7. Tall-masted Indian ships would have made crossing the Pacific from the Bay of Cambay perfectly feasible. Drawing of a Javanese galley, ca. A.D. 880, from a relief carving in Borobudur, Java. (Drawing by Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery, 214)
Fig. 12.8. Drawing of an Indian ship referred to as a “yanapatra,” ca. A.D. 600, from a temple painting. Ancient relief sculptures from Cambodia show ocean vessels capable of making the long crossing of the Pacific Ocean to the Americas. (Drawing by Gunnar Thompson, American Discovery, 214)
An unusual pictoglyph of a boat in the Painted Cave at the Carrizo Plain National Monument in California depicts what appears to be a smaller version of these big vessels from India (see figure 12.9).
In addition, established oral traditions of the Native American Paiutes, passed down from their ancient ancestors, tell of ships sailing into the Death Valley area, making an unimpeded passage from the Gulf of California to the Pacific Ocean. It is therefore possible that the ancients sailed into Lake Lahontan in Nevada, thus explaining the mysterious and ancient Grimes Point petroglyph carving what appears to be of a small Asian elephant carrying a rider.
An overview of this scenario is provided by Ricardo Palleres in his Archaeology Online article “Who Discovered America?”9 and the exciting prospect of visitors from India. This will be examined in detail later in this chapter and in chapter 15 but by way of introduction, some of the possibilities of influences from India on the languages and traditions of the American Indians need to be briefly examined.
Fig. 12.9. Painting of a boat from the Chumash Indians. This pictoglyph is from the Painted Cave, Carrizo Plain National Monument, California (see also color insert).
Author and researcher Gene D. Matlock, who has written many books about India’s connections to Jesus, Moses, Atlantis, and countries such as Mexico, Turkey, and Israel, is certain that seagoing people from India reached America. The Amazon.com blurb for his 2000 book India Once Ruled the Americas! boldly states, “The people of India have long known that their ancestors once sailed to and settled in the Americas. They called America ‘Patala, The Under World,’ not because they believed it to be underground, but because the other side of the globe appeared to be straight down. Now, at last, many mysteries about Ancient America, such as the identity of the Mexican Quetzalcoatl, the true origins of our Native-American, etc., will be cleared up, once and for all.”10
Matlock claimed that traders from the Indus Valley or the Indo-Turkish region reached the Americas in 5,000–4,000 B.C. where they mined minerals in Michigan, Colorado, southern Arizona, Peru, and other parts of both North and South America. More reliably, he demonstrated a direct connection between specific Native American tribes and peoples from India.
Matlock’s thesis is that migrations from India inundated the American Southwest with conquest, colonization, and mining expeditions that engendered and influenced many modern-day Native American peoples, including the Navajo, Hopi, Hohokam, and Tohono O’odham (Pima) tribes. He suggested that the exoduses of these peoples and cultures were set in motion by devastating floods, political instability, wars, and purges as a consequence of the Indian caste system. However, it all ended after about A.D. 1200, when sectarian and religious wars between Indian Brahmans and invading Moslems divided and isolated India.
According to Matlock, the Nagas (the “People of the Snake” in Sanskrit) were a highly civilized mercantile class from what is now Afghanistan, Tibet, Pakistan, and northwestern India who eventually expanded their influence throughout the world. The Naga capital was called Oudh and was located near present-day Herat, Afghanistan. The citizens of Oudh were called Oudh-am, which means “people” in Sanskrit. Thus, according to Matlock, it is no coincidence that the name of the Tohono O’odham tribe from southern Arizona and northern Mexico had the same root, since in ancient Kashmiri/Sanskrit the word ton, or tahun, means “brotherhood.”11 Moreover, the Native American O’odham word for snake, vah-mat, resembles its counterpart, the Kashmiri (a variation of Sanskrit) word veh-mar. While little remains of the O’odham language, Matlock notes similarities in his study between words from India and the languages of many Native Americans, including the Zuni, Hopi, Navajo, Mogollon, and Hohokam tribes.12
Matlock also refers back to the word Patala, noting that part of the O’odham tribe’s territory is called Pataya. In Kashmiri, the compound word Pata-Yah means “the Place of Shiva (Yah).”13 He also made a direct connection between what the Pima tribe called Se-eh-ha, Siwa, or Su-u (Elder Brother) and Shiva. The Tohono O’odhams worship him as I’toi or I’Itsoi, which linguistically is nearly identical to Isa, another Indian word for Shiva cited by Matlock.14
Consistent with what Taddei proposed, Matlock noted that the Nagas needed to enlist aboriginal laborers to sustain their mining operations across the Pacific. Thus, these Nagas provided instructions on building structures, raising vegetables, preparing food, and calendar keeping to the natives, but withheld their advanced metal processing and weapon technologies.
ENCOUNTERS WITH A ROCK ART INVESTIGATOR
A name well known among Great Basin rock art enthusiasts is Carl Bjork, a former forest ranger.15 He became interested in studying petroglyphs after reading Barry Fell and other authors, including LaVan Martineau, who wrote the 1976 book The Rocks Begin to Speak: Understanding Indian Rock Writing.16 As a ranger, he had access to sites often not recorded or previously known, and in his forty years of investigations approached all rock art sites with great reverence, referring to them as “someone else’s church.”
It is interesting that Bjork’s law enforcement background with the California Department of Forestry and Fire Protection helped him develop a method for profiling criminal serial arsonists. Applying it to rock art sites, he came up with a novel “who done it and why here?” approach to investigating ancient petroglyphs. As he discovered patterns, he was then often able to pre
dict where additional rock art sites would be located.
In conversations with Bjork at Grimes Point and Indian Grinding Rock State Historic Park (near Pine Grove, California), he suggested that the original rock art symbols were a nonverbal pictorial system, a type of universal communication. They had one universal language to communicate universal concepts, but over time the original meanings were lost. “Hermetic drift” is the term coined by Taddei to describe the phenomenon: over generations the original esoteric meanings and intricate counting cycles were lost, then later generations replicated the symbols without understanding the original intention or meaning.
Fig. 12.10. Rock art investigator Carl Bjork on a 2011 field trip to Grimes Point, Nevada.
Bjork suggests that the cravings and paintings were a communication system used throughout the Americas and the world by peoples who spoke many different languages and dialects but needed a non-oral communication method to share knowledge. As Martin Brennan found in his studies in Mexico, the petroglyphs, carvings, paintings, and hand-sign systems of communication would have worked well as a pictorial method of communication for all to understand.
However, according to Bjork, one cannot simply “read” the rock art panels since reading involves phonics and an alphabet using the indigenous language that is spoken by a specific cultural group. Instead, he says it is how the symbols are arranged, their relationships to each other, and the placement of each symbol on the rock that are significant. Because of the depth of Bjork’s understanding and the reverence he brings to his study of rock art, he has gained the respect of government archaeologists and many of the Native Americans. For example, after years of study, he agrees with Taddei and Matlock, among others, that these peoples were driven out of India by hostile events and inhospitable environmental conditions. After this, he thinks that the original Hopi people came by boat to California and headed east to Arizona just as a Hopi elder once told him: “We came from another land to the coast of California and made it to the mesas in which we live today.”
Investigating other Hopi legends, Bjork deduced that the first Hopis would have landed near Oxnard, California, and traveled east, following the rivers and the bases of the mountains to the Colorado River after crossing it near Needles. By following the eastern and southern side of the river they would have crossed the deep canyon of the Little Colorado River, which required a steep climb out to the Tuba City, Arizona, area. Later, they were forced by the warlike Navajo (the Diné) to go southeast to the top of the mesas. After this, the overland path of the first Hopis became a major trade route from the California coast to the Four Corners area and beyond.
Bjork also postulates that earlier migrants from the Pacific arrived in Panama and then traveled north to Mexico to become the Toltecs and Aztecs. With more migrations, they continued north to the Gulf of California and then traveled from the mouth of the Colorado River to the Las Vegas area. From there they migrated throughout the region.
In a wider context, Bjork suggests that waves of migrations came into the Americas from the Indus Valley, China, and Southeast Asia. He added that other major landing points from abroad would have been the bays of present-day San Francisco and Portland, Oregon. From the San Francisco entrance, the ancient miners could have then traveled south through the San Joaquin Valley, east over the Walker Pass, west to the Carrizo Plains, and then into Nevada and the sites of the Eastern Sierra petroglyph locations, including some near Bishop, California. As for Portland, from that northern outpost, the ancient travelers would have followed the Columbia River and then gone east to the Snake River until it became impassable due to rapids near Celebration Park and Boise, Idaho. (See figures 12.11 and 12.12 below.)
In regard to petroglyph hunting, Bjork says it is important to understand that in the greater California region of the United States, trade and travel routes followed the ridge tops of the mountains and not the steep, rocky river bottoms. For example, one of the major trade routes from the Sacramento, California, area used the ridgetops that now are just north of Interstate 80, which was the same route the forty-niners used in the Gold Rush era.
Fig. 12.11. The Columbia River Gorge is home to some of North America’s oldest megalithic petroglyphs.
Fig. 12.12. The Snake River petroglyphs near Celebration Park, with complicated designs and counts.
PETROGLYPH SITES NEAR BISHOP, CALIFORNIA
There are four significant Great Basin petroglyph sites accessible via a dirt road just north of Bishop at the edge of the Long Valley caldera: Chidago, Chalfant, Fish Slough, and Red Canyon.17 At these sites, many petroglyphs demonstrate striking similarities to aspects of cultures of the Far East, including the Indus Valley and Arabian sources.
In 2007, I was fortunate to be at the Red Canyon site for the spring equinox. There, I stood gazing at one of the largest petroglyphic images of a man I had ever seen. He was four feet tall with outstretched arms, as in Leonardo da Vinci’s famous image of the Divine Man. At noontime with a rush of jubilation I observed a triangle of light resting on his outstretched arms, with the apex of the light encasing his head. Six spread-out fingers on his left hand count the days to the equinox.
However, it was only after later reviewing my photographs that I noticed the light was also making a sun dagger pointing to a second, vulva-shaped petroglyph above the shaman, which I had overlooked while filming the triangle of light. This upper petroglyph involves a sun dagger penetrating the figure-eight-shaped vulva symbol. Like the Pathfinder site in Colorado (chapter 6), the Red Canyon petroglyph portrayed the male and female principles in a noontime equinox heliolithic alignment.
Fig. 12.13. A photo with enhancements of a shaman holding a “triangle of light” on the equinox (see also color insert).
Fig. 12.14. Equinox noontime alignment detail, Red Canyon. The darkened mouth appears to be a natural divot in the stone.
Fig. 12.15. Equinox noontime alignment, upper glyph details, Red Canyon. The drawing in upper right by author provides details of the distorted glyph resulting from the angle of the petroglyph as seen from below. The image may represent a vagina below and a womb above.
I also visited the Chalfant site, where more than four hundred petroglyphs cover a six-hundred-foot-long cliff face. Many patterns associated with vulva-like petroglyphs adorn the wall. Bjork suggests that these and the associated lined circular glyphs are similar to the petroglyphs found in Tamil, India.
Fig. 12.16. Petroglyph from Tamil, India. (Enhanced by author)
Fig. 12.17. Petroglyphs near Bishop, California (see also color insert).
In 2013 Chalfant received significant media attention after vandals used saws to remove several of the rock art panels. It’s unfortunate that mainstream attention comes only when the sites are desecrated. It is precisely because of this that we must accelerate protection efforts while continuing to record the information preserved at these sites while they still survive.
A STORY OF THE KIVA
Gene Matlock also wrote that there are many other cultural, linguistic, and religious connections between India and Native American tribes. One of these is the kiva, the ceremonial chamber of many Pueblo people, including the Hopis and Anasazis. While most kivas are round, the largest and one of the earliest in North America is rectangular and found at Casa Malpaís, an ancient Pueblo archaeological site located near the town of Springerville, Arizona. This kiva resembles the shape of a Shiva linga altar, and it may show direct links to people who migrated from India before they became a thriving pre-Chaco Canyon culture.
Further evidence of these migrations is found in the Hopi origin myth and the Hopi language. Matlock reported that the name of Khiva, an ancient city-state in what is now Uzbekistan, was the root word for kiva in the Hopi tradition. Khiva has been inhabited for about ten thousand years and is so named because of the sun-baked pit-houses where ladders were used to enter from the roof. This is precisely what kivas look like in the Hopi world.
Fig. 12.18. The kiva at Casa Malpaís
in Arizona has the same rectangular shape as a Shiva linga altar.
THE STORY OF KOKOPELLI
Kokopelli is one of the most popular motifs in modern America and is being used in advertising and reproduced on pottery, countless T-shirts, and artwork. Most of the original Kokopelli images were carved or painted in the Southwest within the last 1,200 years, although some images are known to go back even further. But what makes Kokopelli so compelling, and where did he come from?
The basic Kokopelli motif is a hunched-over or hunchbacked flute player, often wearing a headdress and sometimes sporting a large penis. There are many stories relating him to fertility, one being that he would travel between tribes playing his flute and carrying his songs and seeds on his back to usher in the spring from winter. After getting everyone in the village dancing and singing, in the morning he would be gone, but the corn fields would be four feet tall, and all the women would be pregnant.18 Thus he became the god of harvest and plenty for the Navajo, bringing fertility and seeds to the People.
Secrets of Ancient America: Archaeoastronomy and the Legacy of the Phoenicians, Celts, and Other Forgotten Explorers Page 21
